Ex-Bay street lawyer talks about how lawyers became greedy, unprincipled enablers of the rich

Question/Answer[my emphasis]

It’s hard to imagine a book titled Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession (Penguin) is going to be popular with your colleagues. Why did you write it?
I know lawyers are going to say, “Come on, he’s talking about 15 or 20 members of a profession that has 90,000.” But in telling these stories I’m trying to extract general ideas: the amoral nature of legal practice, the gross deficiencies of the regulation of lawyers, the sense of misery that pervades the legal profession.

Do you think most of the lawyers you write about started off bad, or did the practice of law change them?
Why do people end up doing things they shouldn’t do? Their upbringing, their background? The point is, I don’t think there’s anything in the legal profession now that restrains people’s bad impulses, I don’t think there’s a generally accepted code of conduct or a vibrant disciplinary system.

This isn’t just a Canadian problem, either. On my desk I have an editorial from a South African magazine which begins, “Let’s face it, our legal system has effectively collapsed … One of the more obvious reasons is the culture of greed, pride and self-indulgent arrogance that pervades the legal profession.” Then there’s this gem from the South China Morning Post about a client who asked for a breakdown of his legal bill, which included a charge for “recognizing you in the street, crossing a busy road to talk to you to discuss your affairs, and recrossing the road after discovering it was not you.”

As you point out, in 2004 only 44 per cent of Canadians said they trusted lawyers, whereas two years earlier, 54 per cent said they did. Why do people dislike lawyers so much?
Lawyers are seen as greedy, and in good measure I think that’s a justifiable criticism, and also unprincipled. Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important point of all, the average person has no real access to lawyers, to the legal system, to justice. It’s all right if you’re very poor and have the kind of problem that legal aid will help with, but most Canadians have middle-class incomes and simply can’t afford to hire a lawyer. The chief justice has spoken out about this, but very little is being done to rectify it. It’s fundamentally undemocratic. It’s as if somebody tried to pass a law that said you can’t vote in a federal election unless you have an income of $100,000 or more. Well, there would be a revolution.

How has the legal profession changed in Canada over the past few decades?
In very general terms, it has become a business: interested in profit, not interested in making judgments, not interested in providing access to poor people or even middle-income people. The old ideas — that lawyers have something to do with justice and fairness, and are part of an important system that provides a stable, safe, law-abiding society — have, to the extent that you can generalize, been lost by members of the legal profession.

You taught law for 13 years, both at McGill and the University of Western Ontario, where you were the dean of law. Is there something about legal training that nudges lawyers toward amorality?
Yes, I think so. Law students are taught and lawyers subsequently believe that it is not their job to pass judgment on their clients as people, or to pass judgment on what their clients want to do. Lawyers are enablers. They are there to try to do what their client wants, and are in many cases paid handsomely for it. The whole question of the values behind the rules of the legal system is not on the whole of great interest to law schools or the legal profession. And there’s an additional point: lawyers are taught to manipulate the rules in favour of their clients. If you’re a manipulator of rules, then you can’t respect the rules as such or believe that they incorporate important values.

…

What kind of ethical dilemmas does the average lawyer face?
The average lawyer in a big firm practice faces the requirement to put aside whatever kit bag of values, principles and ethics he may personally subscribe to and concentrate on making it possible for clients to do what they want to do. No client comes into a lawyer’s office and wants to have a discussion about whether it’s a good thing or socially desirable to do this, that, or the other. And they’ll seek another lawyer if you try to have that discussion.

There’s a big incentive for lawyers to pad their bills, isn’t there?Yes, and it’s common practice. It’s easy to round up. It’s easy to reflect on what you’ve done during the day and say you’ve worked for seven hours rather than six.

…

Why are lawyers so miserable?
If you practise law you’re plunged into what is by its nature a highly competitive, highly stressful environment that sucks up most of your time at the expense of things that most people think go a long way toward making life worth living, such as spending time with family, or reading a book.

The same could be said of many jobs, like banking or even journalism.
No doubt. But I think there’s more to it for lawyers than simply stress. If you’re a doctor, you may have a hell of a day, but at least you can be comforted by the idea that in some small way you improved the general state of society. I don’t think you can believe that if you’re a lawyer. I hasten to add that legal practice is very diverse, and there are lots of different kinds of people practising law, and this is not true of all of them. But it’s true of a lot of them. You come home at the end of the day and say, “Why did I bother doing that? What I’ve really done is make rich people a little bit richer, maybe, and as a result of that I can send them a big bill.” This is not a good way to spend your life. After you get over the initial drama of this high-stakes environment, you’re left with the feeling that this is a pointless occupation and you should find something more worthwhile to do.

Why did most of your students go into law?
A lot of people don’t like lawyers and would be horrified if their child came home and said, “I want to be a lawyer.” But it is a profession, and one with the potential of generating a significant income. It gives its members a certain power, the power of knowing something that other people don’t know [credence good provider]. And there is a kind of glamour associated with it. Look at all the television programs that deal with the law — people are fascinated with this process, even though they’re deeply suspicious of lawyers. And I think in many cases, certainly this was true in my case, people went into law because they couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Is there something else you should have done?
Oh yes, but I’m not going to tell you. I find myself increasingly in the role of critic of the legal profession, but I’ve spent my life as a lawyer. I went to law school in 1966, I’ve been in the legal profession one way or another for 41 years, it gives me no pleasure at the end of all that to look back and say, “Oh God, this was not a good way to spend my time.”

Is this book your penance?
[laughs] No. Do I think it will lead to some kind of significant reform of the legal profession? Of course not. It’s beyond any one person’s ability to do that. Do I think some kind of significant rethinking of the profession is in order? You bet I do.

So many of the lawyers you write about wound up stealing from their clients or bilking their firms. But greed wasn’t always the motive, was it?
No. I first got interested in this whole subject in 1989 or 1990, when I was a junior partner [at Blake, Cassels & Graydon]. The most prominent partner, Bob Donaldson, a nationally if not internationally respected lawyer making lots of money, was suddenly found to have had his hand in the till. That was a startling fact in itself, but here’s the thing that puzzled me most of all: the amounts of money involved were relatively minor. It wasn’t as if millions and millions had disappeared, it was more on the order of using money improperly to buy airline tickets to go to Bermuda for the weekend, penny-ante stuff by his standards. Why would somebody risk everything — reputation, friendship, professional status, even potentially freedom — for that? It certainly wasn’t greed. And in nearly every case I write about, the lawyers didn’t do it, for the most part, for money.

Well, is it self-destructiveness or is it arrogance?
Arrogance is part of it. If you’re taught how to manipulate rules, you lose respect for them, and that leads to a kind of arrogance: I’m bigger than the rules, I’m not the average man on the street who needs to be law-abiding because I know how to get around the rules. And there may be just a touch of the more common form of arrogance, too, which is “I’m smarter than they are, they’ll never catch me.” But you can be arrogant and still have a healthy sense of what’s good for you, and what dangers you shouldn’t run. I have some speculation about why people behave this way, and one reason is simple boredom. When people are bored, there’s a tendency to take risks.

What happens to lawyers who steal? How is the profession regulated?
The disciplinary process of the law societies in this country is deeply flawed. Lawyers are disciplined for breaches of professional rules, but it’s like so much in Canada: everything depends on where you live. What can get you disbarred in Alberta won’t have much effect on you at all in, say, Nova Scotia. The first difficulty with the disciplinary system is that if you’re a lawyer who’s alleged to have stepped afoul of the rules, you’re investigated by the law society. If they decide you’re a transgressor, they’ll prosecute you, they’ll hire a lawyer to do that, and the disciplinary committee itself is the law society. So you have the investigator, the prosecutor and the judge all essentially representing the same institution. I thought in this country we had a fundamental principle, that the person who investigates and prosecutes isn’t the same person who judges.

Is yours a widely held opinion?
I haven’t heard people rising up to complain about this. In the United States, by the way, disciplinary matters in just about every state are heard by courts, not by panels of the bar association, which is how it should be. I think Canada really has to get its act together. Look at the reforms in the U.K., which woke up some years ago to this problem and [adopted] quite sweeping reforms that largely removed self-regulation from the legal profession. Why in heaven the same sort of reforms are not under consideration in this country I do not know, except that self-regulation is regarded with quasi-religious fervour.

…

You talked to quite a few lawyers who’ve been caught doing something wrong. How many of them actually expressed remorse?
On the whole, there was not a whole lot of remorse expressed. I don’t think these were penitent people who were terribly ashamed of doing a bad thing. Take the case of Martin Wirick, the B.C. lawyer who was involved in a massive real estate fraud, I think it’s the single biggest legal fraud that Canada has ever experienced. It wasn’t as if he was stockpiling money to run off to South America. The most he ever got out of it was payment of very ordinary legal bills, and in fact I don’t think the client ever even fully paid them. So he didn’t do it for money. When I talked to him, he said things like, “Oh, I was just so tired, I just didn’t give a shit, I was unhappy, I hadn’t had a vacation in years.” What he did not say was, “When I think back on what I did, I’m so sorry about it, I’m so sorry about people who lost money as a result of my activities.” I think he was hapless, a bit of a schlemiel, and his client was a charismatic, glamourous person.

Is it common for lawyers to become enamoured of their clients?
Oh yes, very much so. I think lawyers can have a hero worship of their clients. Think of the whole Conrad Black trial, that poor Mark Kipnis who will probably go to jail because he did what the boss told him to do. It’s [a case of] the dull old lawyer with the charismatic client who says “Do this, do that,” and does the lawyer say, “Just a minute sir, this is not right”? No, of course not, because dull people can easily fall under the sway of charismatic people. I think quite a lot of that happens in the legal profession, though I have to emphasize that there’s a lot of difference between [a big firm] at Bay and King in Toronto and the single practitioner in Goderich. If you have an important client, a Conrad Black or somebody like that, who says he wants to do something but you refuse, he’ll just say, “Fine, I’m sure the law firm across the street will do it.” If your important client, who is also a big source of revenue for your firm, walks out the door, well, it’s not going to be good for your career. It takes a very strong and principled person to do that, particularly when you consider that the law is very complicated, and it’s not always absolutely clear what’s right, what’s wrong, what can and cannot be done. That makes it easier to say, “Well, let’s try it out and see what happens.”

Who stands out in your mind as being the worst of the bad lawyers you wrote about? I’m guessing you’re going to say Ingrid Chen, the Winnipeg lawyer.
There’s no doubt that she behaved abominably. She’s now in prison, because it was established that she hired enforcers to beat up clients who upset her, along with a whole variety of other things. But the behaviour was so bizarre, so manifestly self-destructive and likely to lead to catastrophe, that you can’t just say she’s a bad person who got what’s coming to her. It’s more that she has some deep problems that need to be sorted out. An interesting case is Michael Bomek, a criminal lawyer based in Flin Flon, Man. with a largely Aboriginal clientele, who was thought to be a creative and gutsy lawyer who fought against an RCMP detachment that was thought to be racist, and indeed there was subsequently a government commission that found it was racist. He was a notable figure and something of a hero, almost. And then it turned out that he had been having sexual relations with some of his male Aboriginal clients. The RCMP accused him of sexual assault and indeed he pled guilty, went to prison and was disbarred, though for other reasons. I went to Flin Flon and to the reserve and I wound up feeling sorry for him, I found him quite an engaging character. I wrote [an article] about him but subsequently he got into all kinds of other trouble. He got out of prison and was running a hot dog stand in Prince Albert — where’s Monty Python when you need them? — but he wasn’t just selling hot dogs, he was selling marijuana. The police busted him. But then the whole thing took a sinister turn, he was charged with further sexual transgressions involving children and was convicted of some of them. You look at this guy and there’s a lot, dare I say it, to admire, certainly in his early career. But perhaps, as the Crown attorney who prosecuted him the first time around told me, he’s a psychopath. I’d be very surprised if he had the slightest little bit of penitence in him.

Why are lawyers now so instrumental in money laundering operations?
There’s recently been a whole spate of national and international rules about money laundering, trying to get rid of it because it promotes organized crime. In Canada, lawyers have resisted, successfully, application of those rules to the legal profession. To simplify, they’ve said, “You cannot oblige us to report cash transactions to a government agency” — which, by the way, banks are now obliged to do — “because to do that would be a fundamental violation of solicitor-client privilege.” Meanwhile, those who know anything about this, like the auditor general of Canada and various high officials in the RCMP, have said that partly because they’re largely exempt from these rules, lawyers can become, and some have become, agents of money laundering. You go to your lawyer with cash because he’s exempt from these rules. The law society will say, “No, no, no, we have rules about this, any cash transaction over a certain amount has to be reported to the society.” But there certainly isn’t the full oversight by federal authorities that you find in all other areas where financial transactions happen. I think invoking solicitor-client privilege is nonsense. If you’re a lawyer, and somebody walks into your office and says he’s going to buy a house and needs to put a $50,000 deposit down, and here’s a briefcase full of cash, would you not think, Hmmm, this is very unusual? It’s not some massive encroachment of solicitor-client privilege to address this issue. It’s just plain common sense.

…

How can the average person protect herself from being cheated by a lawyer?Do not be overawed, and feel free to question both the advice and the bill. Before the Internet, lawyers were gatekeepers, really the only ones, to this vast store of legal knowledge. Now, anybody can go on the Internet and get any Canadian statute, regulation, or case, easily. But people don’t seem to be doing that in the same way they do it with medicine, where if you have a pain in your toe, you go on Google.

separate diagnosis from treatment within the repair cycle (proven to minimize credence good opportunism problems), and

move to solve the lawyer:client opportunism and the don’t-switch-horses-in-the-middle-of-the-race (sunk costs) dilemmas.

Paper-based, 19C linear technology (the law) being electrocuted by hundreds of dissident franchisee blogs, each with an ISP icon that instantly makes the [current economic rents (payments over what is justified: gouging) of a jealously guarded monopoly on information], drop instantly to next-to-zero.

If my analysis is correct, the appropriate regulatory and administrative law response would be to acknowledge and receive an individual citizen’s opinion, but if inaction in the face of demonstrative wrongdoing by “winners” in brokering industrial interests plead either:

resource poverty or

legislative incapacity.

With the passing of the Ontario Arthur Wishart Act (Franchise Disclosure), 2000 (2) was off the table so the only option left was 1.: lack of resources. Mr. Allan MacDermid of the now ironically and historically frequently renamed Ministry of Small Business and Consumer Services played that card: love to help but our hands are tied (no $).

Funny thing is: I never asked the Ontario government for economic help, having determined that this must be a private sector solution. [free download of 2003 ISP Proposal].

Post navigation

9 Responses to Lawyers are Rats: A top legal scholar exposes the corruption of his profession

With regards to Ingrid Chen. She is not in jail. in fact in Dec. 2008 was stopped and charged for driving under the influence. She refused the breathalyzer. (see Winnipeg Sun, Dec.12,2008). Her court case is due in Feb.2010

I suffered a catstrophic head injury in a motor vehicle accident on September 18, 1994. In the 16+ years post-accident I’ve been bounced from pillar-to-post by four law firms.

The first law firm withheld material information and failed to disclose it represented the insurer and the company that acquired my insurer at the material time.

The second law firm withheld material information and failed to disclose the principal partner was, in fact, a founding director and major shareholder of the company that acquired my insurer at the material time.

The third law firm refused to commence legal action against the first two law firms with respect to the independent actionable wrongs perpetrated above and beyond the original litigation based on a contract of insurance.

The fourth law firm professed to recognize two distinct causes of action and then betrayed my legal cause and abandoned my legal rights by allowing limitation periods to commence legal proceedings run out of time.

The Law Society failed to investigate the initial complaint against the first two law firms in any meaningful way. Further, when the matter was appealed to the Compalints Resolution Commissioner, Mr. Abdul A. Chahbar, the appeal was dismissed and the file was closed.

The Law Society has a mandate to govern the legal profession in the public interest, in theory, so Ontarians can have an ‘independent bar’.

In fact, the Law Society knowingly betrayed the public trust when they appointed Mr. Chahbar to the office of Complaint Resolution Commissioner. Mr. Chahbar was in a disqualifying conflict of interest when he dismissed my appeal on March 12, 2003.

Mr. Chahbar’s connection to LPIC at the material time is verified by the Law Society of Upper Canada ‘Minutes of Special Convocation’ Thursday, 31st of July, 2003. Mr. Chahbar is listed as, Member, LPIC Board of Directors, Vice-Chair, LPIC Audit Committee, Member, LPIC Sub-Audit Committee, Member, Law Pro Board of Directors and, Member, Law Society of Upper Canada Government Relations Committee.

Its an appalling betrayal of the public trust when the complaint resolution and appeal process is ‘rigged’ in favour of the Law Society’s wholly-owned insurance company subsidiary; when a member of LPICs Board of Directors is ’embedded’ as Complaint Resolution Commissioner to dismiss appeals and close complaint files against lawyers which, ultimately, would lead to a claim against a policy of professional liability insurance issued by LPIC/Law Pro Insurance

The operative word for such activity is ‘racketeering’.

Mr. Slayton’s book just scratches the surface with respect to the culture of corruption entrenched in the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Back in 1990, when the Law Society was confronted with an ‘insurance crisis’, they took it upon themselves to organize and incorporate the Lawyer’s Professional Indemnity Company (“LPIC”).

LPIC is a conflicting financial interest that impinges on, and alters, the ability of the Law Society to govern the legal profession in the public interest and, a betrayal of the public trust.

Mr. Chahbar was receiving a financial benefit from LPIC at the material time.

By 1994, LPIC was facede a $200 million deficit. The Law Society hired Malcom Heins, a lawyer and former President & CEO of Simcoe-Erie Insurance, a large professional liability insurance company, to take over as President and CEO of LPIC. Further, the complaint and appeal process available to members of the public with legitimate complaints against members was ‘rigged’ in favour of the Law Society’s wholly owned insurance company subsidiary. Essentially, every complaint file Mr. Chahbar closed and every appeal Mr. Chahbar dismissed was one less claim against a policy of professional indemnity insurance issued by LPIC.

The mandate of self-regulation granted to the legal profession by the people of Ontario pursuant to the Law Society Act should be revoked immediately and replaced with a system of independent oversight that is truly in the public interest.

On February 13, 2009 I was compelled to commence a legal proceeding against the fourth law firm without the benefit of counsel. I have been shunned by the legal profession because the defendants are lawyers.

The rule of law?
Equal, fair and impartial?
Let Right Prevail?

The corruption in the Law Society of Upper Canada is out of control.

I hereby call upon the government of Ontario to initiate reform the Law Society Act and a system of independent oversight of the profession in the public interest.

Just as BIG business has taken over Main Street small businesses, BIG LAW and the drive for profits for BIG LAW now deprives ordinary citizens of the ability to address the courts in pursuit of justice. The majority of judges are the product of BIG LAW who have instructed the Judges on the importance of survival of BIG BUSINESS and BIG LAW.

When “the rule of law” is influenced and written to favor Big Business and Big Law, who work together, the average citizen can’t afford to address the courts. What is determined to be “the public good” is determined by Big Business and Big Law.

Even when average citizens get to court, the laws that Big Business influence the legislatures to make are not “equal, fair and impartial” and it is Big Business and Big Law who decide what is “right” and what will “prevail.”

I admire your courage and I would hope that the people of Ontario, through their legislators, would be interested and protest —but, unfortunately, the public doesn’t know what is going on and will not be educated as to what is going onl “Outrage” and “shock” is out of style and the “editorial voice” of big business, supported by big law, seeks to keep the public ignorant. It is the lawyers, of course, who drive the getaway cars and who determine what judges will sit in the courts.

Here is a statement from the one presidential candidate who actively supports the legalization of medical marijuana nationwide! “Patients receiving cannabinoids [smoked marijuana and marijuana pills] had improved immune function compared with those receiving placebo. They also gained about 4 pounds more on average than those patients receiving placebo.” You can read more and support her campaign on her site http://denisebedio.com/marijuana. Join us and together, we can create a true land of the free.

I wish you the best. The politics and neo conservative racists bigots exists in all forms of government. Boys become men and this thinking
about skin colour or gender has to stop. The good old boys club still exists and I know all about being marginalized by government officials and lied to by supposed associates. I wish you well and don’t give up the fight.

We do have a world wide problem with our legal profession and just as with rats the lawyers learn very quickly ow to avoid traps. When they loose all principals towards caring for the family unit and only maintain the principle of the pursuit of more money the whole world has a problem. It means that decisions are no longer made on the basis of right or wrong but on the basis of increasing the money flow. As with the fable of Midas, when we only left with gold and life and love have disappeared we may as well be dead.
In www,lawyersorgraverobbers.com we discuss the failure of the law in Australia to acknowledge family as the primary building block for our civilization, unfortunately Australia has never formed a treaty with its original inhabitants and has ignored the significance of family within its legal structures.

Nowhere in this post do we even discuss the solution to this universal problem. Boredom, arrogance and greed are discussed – all good points. Should we be repairing the law to make it less manipulable? Should we have judges with balls/empowerment to call the obvious law-scoff and legal bully when they saddle the already overbusy court resources?
Why is this a seemingly universal human condition? We all want justice, we all know what it looks like, those who practice it aren’t interested in providing it so it is nowhere to be found. Our race universally agrees on right vs wrong but nobody can get justice to their moral dilemmas. If lawyers are some of the world’s smartest thinkers (I believe they are) and they can’t solve this universal problem of injustice/inaffordability etc, then we are wasting our time talking to the wrong people. It could be, the human/moral problem is a “religious” problem rather than a problem with the system, the Rules, the politics or the access.